A "citizens' jury" hearing, similar to those held in many EU countries to adjudicate on issues of public controversy, has been organised to consider Galway's waste management plan.
A group of randomly-selected Galway residents was given details at the weekend of the £158 million plan to radically change waste practices in the city and county by significantly increasing waste-recycling and reuse, by reducing landfill and by building a £60 million thermal treatment plant (incinerator) for much of Connacht's waste.
The plan is meeting stiff opposition in areas proposed as possible locations for a new large landfill in the county, and in the vicinity of Galway city, where it is envisaged that the incinerator will be located.
There is also opposition to the Ballinasloe landfill, which is intended to take all of Galway's waste up to 2005, and similar plans are meeting strong opposition throughout the county.
Although the hearing, convened by NUI Galway's department of political science and sociology - the first to be held in Ireland on a development controversy - was not binding, many of the parties involved in the plan's implementation have undertaken to consider its outcome.
The convenor, Mr Brendan Flynn, lecturer in comparative politics at NUI Galway, said that the citizens' jury model was a way of looking at how development plans could be made to work with public support.
It was likely to prove useful with regard to other issues of controversy in Ireland and was not by-passing politicians or the courts, but adding to the democratic process. The hearing was supported by the Department of the Environment's Environmental Partnership Fund. "This was not a PR exercise, and it's more than consultation. It's deliberation. The outcome will go into the public domain", Mr Flynn said.
Sending out information leaflets was good basic consultation, but did not allow for a two-way dialogue to emerge between citizens and the local authorities.
A representative of the environmental consultants MC O'Sullivan, who drew up the plan with Danish specialists in thermal treatment design, COWI, outlined its proposals to 11 citizens. She accepted that the plan was ambitious in that it set a recycling target of up to 35 per cent and would heavily depend on citizens carefully segregating their refuse.
Other experts, including the environmental body An Taisce, submitted their views. Mr Derrick Hambleton, chairman of the Galway branch of An Taisce, said the debate was only beginning. The plan simply underlined the need for every individual to consider how they would address their waste obligations.
Whatever technologies were decided, they should be proven, Mr Hambleton said. There was a lot of concern about the type of incinerator which would be built and about how would it be operated and monitored.
The hearing itself, he added, was "a tremendous advance for ordinary people" and deserved to be considered historic in the Irish context.
Mr Enda Moloney, the council's head of environmental administration, outlined the philosophy behind the plan. He accepted that the local authority's waste record had been poor in the past, but emphasised its commitment to change.
To succeed, the project would require "a monumental change" in public attitudes. Whatever came out of the jury process would be looked at by the local authority, he said.
The jury's provisional findings indicated acceptance of the plan's thrust but concern about the "process" and how it would be implemented and regulated. It called for specific information on the selection of an incinerator and suggested that a third-party "citizens' expert" should monitor developments. Particular concern was expressed by the jury about waste transportation, and it made a recommendation that rail options should be fully examined.
